ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes inquiry into trauma wherein the subject’s facticity – its temporally finite existence in the world – is made structural, making possible the conditions for clinical trauma. Leaving the Cartesian separation of world and subject, as well as the Kantian fascination with knowledge, the diverse thought of Heidegger, Levinas, and Lacan stake out what I call – pursuant to Foucault’s analysis of ethics as self-forming practices – “ethical ontologies of finitude,” where the subject’s traumatically temporal self-absence becomes the condition for truth and knowledge. Because the modern subject’s being never appears in its statements, in its sedimented articulations, its reality is always transcendent of knowledge. This allows for radical but practical freedom and reflexivity, as any final or exhaustive fixing of one’s being is always traumatically deferred, rerouted from a never accomplished future through a never fully remembered past.
